In July a good acquaintance approached me regarding a large task: he needed a website redesign for a non-profit institution. LaSalle Academy, founded in 1848, is a small private school located in Manhattan, and has a mission of educating young men of diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds with special out-reach to those most in need. The idea of doing a redesign for a private institution with such a long history and a wonderful mission was exciting – and I was thrilled to help.

Here is what the site looked like before:

Initially, I had agreed to do the design within the framework of their existing learning community management system. LaSalle’s original design had been created using it and it seemed at first that might be the most seamless transition for LaSalle.

Yet during the initial stages of design it became clear that learning community management system’s design tools didn’t support jquery, or ajax (only Flash) which made it impossible to build a dynamic site which would be viewable on all mobile devices. After a few phone calls, I figured out a way to have LaSalle’s landing site be a WordPress site, and I created the illusion of a backend site supported by Edline. Essentially, I built two sites for LaSalle: The first (external WordPress site) was for information that students, administration and general site visitors could access. The second site: the Edline site, would have login access from the main website. The result was a site that was clean, attractive, and provided full functionality.

Confession: My father’s website was the first business website I designed. Dad (Herman Daniels, MD) is a Bariatrician and has a successful weight loss practice in the Washington, DC area. At the time, he had been abandoned by his web designer, and he needed a new website desperately, and I needed the practice as a new designer. So I took a few days, and put something together. This was the result:

Not a bad looking site, but definitely the work of a beginner. Though the site was successful in increasing business, I thought it was time to revisit it, and give it some new “flare.” I started by assessing his market:

Many of his patients work in and around the Washington, DC area – so the location of his two offices needed to be prominent.

He has a bilingual practice (English and Spanish), so it was important to design a separate Spanish site that incorporated elements of his English site.

He has many patients in the weight maintenance stage of their program, and they need to find tips and recipes easily.

Now, the new homepage of his website showcases his offices, shares basic information about the practice, and updates healthy tips and recipes regularly.

Visit my portfolio to see more images from the redesign, or visit his website at:hermandanielsmd.com to interact with the site.

Story:

Often a website doesn’t quite represent a company in the best light. Take Degenhardt Consulting an executive search firm which is owned by my good friend Carri Degenhardt Burke. Degenhardt Consulting’s original website was created using a hosting package from a company that provided “templates” for small business. Seemed like a good option at first, since web designers can be very expensive, but templates often have a few caveats:

Flat files aren’t content management systems, and therefore aren’t easy to update, unless you know code. And what small business owner knows how to code?

They are limited in color, layout and design.

Over the long run, hosting/design packages are more expensive than CMS (free software + inexpensive hosting).

You are designing your website on their server – which means you may not be able to export your website to another server (you can lose all of your files).

Oh, and the templates… well they aren’t always pretty.

All this to say, Degenhardt Consulting’s original site looked like this:

It had basic information, but it was difficult to navigate. Carri couldn’t update it easily, so updates were infrequent, and she had no social media integration. A no-no given the nature of her business (Executive Recruiting).

Solution

Once we determined that the best site for Degenhardt Consulting and it’s employees would be a WordPress CMS choosing a design was simple. Degenhardt needed a website that had an eye-catching, compelling and interactive front end, yet the backend needed to be easy to update. Carri also writes a number of articles every year, and those articles needed to be included on the website. As well, each of her employees needed their own pages, that were integrated with specific social media options since each employee communicated with their clients using different tools.

I’m very excited to announce that I’m doing a website redesign for Picsfilms.com! Picsfilms (owned by Matthew G. Piccolo) was one of my very first clients last year, so I’m happy that I’ve been given the chance to make a few cosmetic changes to my original design. As well Picsfilms is switching over from the all inclusive Squarespace.com hosting and design package, to a more customizable WordPress option. I’ll write more soon on why I believe Squarespace is an ok option, but not the best option in the long run for beginners.

Picsfilms new website should be up and running by next week. Thanks, Matt, for giving me the opportunity to work on your site again!